Danger, Daria Morgendorffer!
by Smileyfax
Summary: Over a hundred years from now, Daria Morgendorffer finds that space travel isn't all its cracked up to be.


Audio diary of Daria Morgendorffer, stardate February 12, 2142, subjective time.

It's been seven weeks since the hyperdrive was sabotaged, hurtling the Jupiter 2 off God knows where into deep space. We're pretty sure we're still somewhere in the Milky Way galaxy, but stellar cartography was knocked offline along with a bunch of other subsystems, making it a real pain in the ass to chart the stars by hand. If I weren't the only halfway-qualified person onboard this tub, we'd be dead already.

Dad - my father, Jacob Morgendorffer, for any historical archivists or alien archaeologists who stumble upon this - is, on paper at least, the leader of this mission. Dare I tell you how he became leader of this mission, diary? He won a reality show. A goddamn cooking-oriented reality show hosted by the holo-image of an obnoxious celebrity chef from the early 21st century. Of course, he was just supposed to program meals into the food replicators, but he somehow managed to make friends with the CEO of Googlesoft, the idiots funding this little expedition, and dad pitched to him the wonderful idea of sending him and his loving family off to be the first people to set foot on an extrasolar planet instead of, you know, astronauts who trained their whole goddamn lives for it.

The most tragic part is that he can't actually cook real food worth a damn. The food replicators are all on the fritz, and dad's master's degree was in programming them, not cooking food old-style. He's slowly learning, and if we don't all die from food poisoning, he may actually produce something that tastes good. In a few years.

At least he's trying to help out in other ways...

XXXX

"Hey, kiddo!" Jake greeted, before turning back into the guts of the computer he was poking around in. In one hand, he held a multitool, and in the other, he held a technical manual. He kept referring to it before making an adjustment within the computer.

"Uh, hi, Dad," Daria greeted, a slight tremor in her voice. "Look, can you go check the filters on the air scrubbers? I think they need to be switched out."

"Sure thing, Daria, just as soon as I finish up here -"

Daria walked forward and took the items from her father's hands. "Oh, I can wrap it up. You go take care of the scrubbers...they're pretty important."

Jake saluted. "Sure thing, kiddo! You can count on your old man! Not like I could count on my old man...damn you, Mad Dog!" He began shaking his fist at the ceiling as he walked off towards the elevator.

Daria quickly reverted all the changes her father had made in the computer's guts, closed the access panel, and wiped off the sweat that had been beading on her brow. She stared at the technical manual her father had been referring to, her stomach in a hard knot.

The title was 'Antimatter Reactor Maintenance For Dummies'.

XXXX

Let me tell you, diary, it's a good thing I changed the computer alerts to only notify myself of an emergency. If dad had heard 'Three minutes until antimatter reactor containment field failure', he would have probably had a heart attack, or worse, tried to fix it. *Sigh* He did a bang-up job changing those filters, though.

The second-in-command of this cocked-up mission is Major Charles Ruttheimer III. After dad was put in charge of the mission, all the other astronauts in Googlesoft's employ walked out in protest. The company made an appeal to the Navy for some of their pilots, and they gave us...what did the admiral say, again? Their finest man?

XXXX

Daria awoke from suspended animation to the oh-so-wonderful sounds of emergency sirens, strobing red lights, and the shuddering of the Jupiter 2 feeling for all the world like an earthquake. "What's going on?!" she shouted.

"WE'RE GONNA DIE!" Jake screamed ineffectually, while Helen and Quinn squeezed him in a hug, sobbing. Major Ruttheimer was actually doing something, Daria thought...until she looked at the external view monitor and saw that the ship was gunning it straight through a plane of debris. Judging by the gas giant off on the right, Daria figured they had wandered into one of its rings.

Daria stumbled her way across to the pilot's chair (where her father was supposed to sit when he wasn't screaming his fool head off) and, hoping her years of video games would come in handy, pulled back on the big stick at the center of the console. Instantly, the Jupiter 2 sailed up and out of the debris field, and the violent vibrations ceased.

"What the HELL is wrong with you?" she shouted at the major. "Why the FUCK didn't you just PULL UP?"

"...Pull up?"

"Yeah, as in, lift the craft your ass is sitting in out of the fucking debris field, you numbnuts."

"Well...I was doing a pretty good job of dodging them..."

"No you weren't, you goddamn idiot. You were going too fast to dodge any of them! You remember how the ship was shaking itself to pieces just a few moments ago? Those were the deflectors working overtime shooting off all their relatavistic projectiles at those chunks, some of them as big as refrigerators. If a fist-sized one had actually hit the ship - a FIST-SIZED ONE -" Daria made a fist and held it up to Ruttheimer's face for emphasis. "- it would have effectively obliterated this entire spaceship. All because YOU'RE A SPACE PILOT WHO CAN'T THINK IN THREE GODDAMN DIMENSIONS!"

As her family gaped at her in amazement (it was the most emotional she had ever gotten), Major Ruttheimer had only one thing to say: "Feisty!"

She knocked him out with a single punch.

XXXX

I looked at his service record after that. Lowest test scores in the history of the Naval Space Aviator program. The only reason he wasn't summarily booted was because of his father, Ruttheimer the Second, some hotshot from the Mercury Conflicts. The Navy was more than glad to hand him over to us because - get this - he got not just one, not just two, but three female pilots pregnant. And he was more than willing to hop on board himself after he found out all three of their husbands were out for his blood. I don't blame them one bit.

Mom - Helen Morgendorffer - is not taking things well. Hell, she hasn't been taking things well since Dad came home that night and announced we'd be leaving the Earth. She actually threatened divorce, and that was pretty scary, but dad pointed out that she wouldn't have to see either one of her sisters for at least a decade. She couldn't get on the Jupiter 2 fast enough after that.

Of course, now that we're stranded god knows how many trillions of miles from Earth, she's less keen on the idea. In fact, she's probably got the shortest fuse of everybody on this ship. I can't count the number of times she's snapped and 'grounded' me to my quarters for the duration of the trip. The longest any one of those groundings lasted for was three hours, after which Quinn let me out, begging me to fix the clothing recycler.

Quinn...I think this little trip of ours has hit her the hardest. At first, she was insufferable - as you would expect living with the most popular girl on the planet. When she realized not even an hour before launch that she'd actually be leaving it all behind, she became inconsolable. It was one of the most satisfying moments of this ordeal. Now, though...she's become really depressed with the prospect of never going on another date again. Don't tell anybody I said this, diary, but I'm actually starting to worry about her. She spends an inordinate amount of time generating new outfits on the clothing recycler, then feeds them back in when she realizes she has nobody (save her uncool family) to model for, not to mention she has no idea what the Earth fashions are like today.

Eh, I'm sure she'll get over it. The likelihood of a critical system going haywire and killing us all in the next month or two is very high, so I don't really have to worry about her long-term mental health.

The last 'member of our family'...well, diary, I never thought I'd meet anybody who was more of a cynical pain in the ass than I am. Link is actually the son of the CEO of Googlesoft, and he hates everybody. For a while, I thought it was because he had a bad homelife...but that kid is just an asshole. Him coming along was just half publicity stunt, half sympathy from mom (back when she thought it was his dad who was the asshole).

I mean it, this kid really takes being an asshole to a new high. He's smart - smarter than I am - and knows a lot about the systems on this ship. But he just sits in his room with his thumb up his ass. I've been running around like a chicken with my head cut off, having to memorize the inner workings of no less than a dozen subsystems I had no experience with a month ago, with occasional forays into the billion lines of source code for the ship's computer network, and he just fucking sits there, as if the weight of the world was on HIS shoulders. On three separate occasions, everybody onboard has been seconds from death, yet I ask him to start helping around the ship, and he looks at me like I just suggested he flay all the skin from his body. I'm one crisis away from shoving him into an airlock and forcing some actual work out of him. And if not...at least I'll get to watch his eyeballs explode. That'll make me feel a hell of a lot better.

The last person on this ship is a bit of a paradox. On the one hand, Dr. DeMartino is responsible for this whole mess in the first place: a rival corporation paid him to sabotage the Jupiter 2, so they could have the distinction of the first successful hyperdrive flight. It would have worked, too, if he hadn't gotten trapped onboard during liftoff, necessitating him waking us up from suspended animation. The virus he planted in the computer net is still wreaking havoc in the ship, though, and there's no way to format the computer and reinstall it, as the geniuses who arranged this mission thought the computer was failure-proof.

So, he's the asshole responsible for this whole catastrophe, and tried to personally murder me and my family. He's something of a psychotic, as he's prone to violence and screams about every third word for no reason. And he's a professor of history, which isn't of much use when you're trying to prevent your starship from falling apart around you.

Despite all that, though, he's the most interesting person on this ship. He does what he's told, and he tries to help out whenever a life-threatening situation comes up - after all, it was all about the money for him, and he doesn't want to die any more than the rest of us. I often talk with him about the history of the past two hundred years, and he really bares his teeth at the collection of idiots that've run things for the human race, past and present. He often seems just as astonished as I am that the species is still limping along so long after all the crap we've put ourselves through. Most of the time, I find his lectures both amusing and interesting, something that practically all my teachers back in school failed to accomplish.

He's asked me more than once to try and convince my parents and Major Ruttheimer to not tattle on him to the authorities. I'd try, but they just don't like him. They almost spaced him as soon as his involvement in our predicament was discovered. I managed to save him then, but I don't have any illusions about his fate if we ever get back to Earth.

He does regret the sabotage, in retrospect. He confessed that I'm one of the few non-idiots he's ever known, and that he's glad I didn't get blown apart into my individual atoms. His greatest regret, though, and one I happen to agree with, is the damage done to the ship's robot...

XXXX

"Robot, power on," Daria commanded.

"Robutt turned on, huhh huhh huhh," the robot responded.

Daria sighed. "Robot, run diagnostic on speech and cognition matrix."

"Speech matrix is, like, malf...malf...broken, and stuff. Cog...nishun matrix suckssss..."

Daria rubbed the bridge of her nose. The weird stutter she could live with, but the robot was supposed to handle a lot of extremely important tasks for the trip: Major surgery, planetary construction, external ship repairs, and a number of other activities crucial for 'roughing it' in an extraterrestrial environment.

"Robot, run diagnostic on medical database."

"Okay...um, show me your thingies."

"...What?"

"It's, like, time for your thingie cancer screening, or something." Daria knew she had to be seeing something that wasn't there, but a small part of her brain was convinced the robot was leering at her. "Uh, no, it's not. My...'thingies' are just fine."

"Uh, you don't want them to, like, fall off..."

"End medical diagnostic. Robot, power down."

XXXX

The damage it incurred from the virus has basically turned the robot into a blithering moron, and...a pervert. I think. It's...well, I'm just grateful I had my appendix taken out years ago, because I do not want to go under the knife if that bucket of bolts is the one holding it.

So, diary, to recap: Absolutely everything about this mission is fucked. I wake up every day certain that the day will end with the Jupiter disintegrating into a massive fireball at best, and even if the ship somehow holds together long enough for me to get the hyperdrive working, I'm still not sure if I'll ever see Earth again. Or Jane...

I'm not clear on how the hyperdrive handles relativity. When I got the briefing lecture from one of the men who helped invent the thing, the first question I asked was if it could be used to travel back in time, by traveling a great distance from Earth and hopping right back, without letting relativity catch up. Disturbingly, I shocked him into silence with with that question, and I was never able to get a straight answer about it from anyone at Googlesoft after that. The physics databases on the ship tell me nothing about it either; in fact, the most relevant return for the ship network-wide search I did on 'time paradox' came from an 150 year old movie, in which a scientist proclaims that a time paradox could destroy the entire universe, or perhaps only the Milky Way galaxy. It was a comedy.

If we knew where we were and how long objectively we had been travelling, we could easily calculate a return time which put us back at Earth only minutes after we left...but due to the damage to the ship's computers, finding out that information will be near-impossible, so we daren't return to Earth, even if we repaired the hyperdrive, for fear of possibly interrupting our own launch, or perhaps even worse, meddling in Earth's history itself. I don't know if a time paradox would destroy the universe, or if there's some sort of self-correcting mechanism for that (i.e. we get atomized before reaching Earth), but even if we could safely pollute the timeline, the risks involved in being wrong just aren't worth it.

Normally, this is the part where I make small concessions towards the situation being not all that bad. It is. It really is all that bad. Our water purifier only works when it wants to, so to stretch out our water reserves when it's down, I've instituted a two shower per week rule. It smells like a sewer - and I'm not exaggerating, since the toilet paper synthesizer is outright broken. Yeah, Mr. Theoretical Historical Archivist, I bet you just threw up a little. I gag once or twice a day myself, but I've gotten better at keeping it in.

That'll be all for tonight, I'm afraid. I'm going to try and pound down a few more chapters of this manual on repairing nanocircuitry, then take a nap. I don't bother sleeping for longer than three hours any more, since I inevitably get woken up by a crisis, or Mom and Dad having a huge fight, or Quinn, crying, begging me to tell her that she looks pretty in her new dress, or nightmares about just about any damn thing on this trip. Diary, save recording as 'DM21242', encrypt recording using algorithm nine, quit.

XXXXXXXXXX

I was going through my folder of unfinished stories, and discovered I'd had this almost all written out, save for the last few paragraphs. It's not often I write an entire story, then forget about it! I think I vaguely remember being dissatisfied with it for some reason, which is dumb as hell because Present Me really likes it.

In case you don't get it, this is a mash-up of Daria with Lost in Space, with a dash of black comedy for good measure. As usual, it's up to Daria to fight against the current of being surrounded by morons whilst in a hellish situation in order to save the day.

To be honest, I think this works best as a one-shot. I mean, there are places I could take it depending on the direction I took, but...I dunno, I'm just not feeling it. Oh well, maybe I'll change my mind sometime down the line. 


End file.
